"You're a perfect child, a stubborn child! Your mind's in pigtails, like your hair."
Yes, my hair was down. I have rather nice hair.
"If he comes here," I said with my eyes wide, "he will have to come when mother and father are out."
"I'll bring him," said Henry valiantly. "I'm not going to see him calumniated, that's all." Then something struck his sense of humour and he chuckled. "It will be a new and valuable experience to him," he said, "to have to come clandestinely. Do him good!"
I went upstairs then. It had been a fair day's work.
But it's hard to count on a family. Mother sprained her ankle getting out of the car that night and was laid up for three days. I chafed at first. Henry might change his mind or one of the eleven get in some fine work. We declined everything that week, and I made some experiments with my hair and the aid of mother's maid. I wanted a sort of awfully feminine method—not sappy but not at all sophisticated. Toots Warrington is always waved and netted, and all the girls by that time had got earrings and were going round waved and netted too.
I wanted to fix my hair like a girl who slips her hand into a man's coat pocket because she can't help it, and then tries to get it out, and can't because his hand has got hold of it.
Then one night I got it. Henry had dropped in, and found mother with her foot up and the look of a dyspeptic martyr on her face, and father with a cold and a thermometer in his mouth.
"I've come to take Kit to the movies," he announced calmly. "Far be it from me not to contribute to the entertainment of a young lady who is just out!"
"Full of gerbs!" father grunted, referring to the movies of course, not me. But mother agreed.